


The Burdens We Bear

by anslin



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Oneshot, Sad-ish, but only because no one can hear her, introspective, post B&W, she's talking about feelings, slightly ooc yen?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-11-02 13:38:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20765342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anslin/pseuds/anslin
Summary: “You were the first person to ever say that to me, you know? The first person to say 'I love you' and truly mean it.”





	The Burdens We Bear

“You were the first person to ever say that to me, you know? The first person to say _I love you_ and truly mean it.”

The words escape against her will, dribbling out from between thinly pressed lips into the still air. She knows better than to say these things out loud, but he is unconscious, unable to hear her, and each sentence pushes insistently against the cage of her teeth.

The night is warm, quiet. She feels it bend beneath the force of her voice, ripple like a lake broken by stones. With uncharacteristic nervousness, she smooths a hand over her face. _Nobody can hear you_, she reminds herself, _nobody is listening_.

“The words themselves, I’d heard them before of course. And there are others, I think, who have loved me, or at least the idea of me. Sometimes, when Val looked at me, I would see… Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it was some kind of love, but the kind one has for a pet or a plaything. The kind that falls apart once the charm and frills disappear and all that is left… All that is left…”

“Well, I suppose you have seen what is left.”

She reaches out, placing one hand on the bare skin where his shoulder joins with his neck, watching the rise and fall of his chest in short, laboured breaths. She concentrates, feels the flow of warmth through her fingers, watches as his breathing evens out. Though she knows that it is not how magic works, she feels somewhat bereft, as though she has given up another piece of herself.

“I learned early on that if you’re going to live, if you’re going to make it in this accursed world, then you have to do it for yourself. Common people deride sorcerers for being selfish, self-absorbed, without realizing that we don’t start off that way. It’s a learned behaviour, we can’t help but be shaped by the hard glances, the harsh words whispered behind our backs.” Sighing, she lies down by the witcher’s side, her head resting at the crook of his neck.

“I wasn’t always like this. So distant, so…” Her voice trails off and she closes her eyes against the words that come unbidden to her tongue. She isn’t foolish or naïve, she knows what people think of her. Worse than that, she knows they are right. It takes a moment for her to keep going, to pick up the shattered pieces of her words.

“I was a child, once, just like all other children. So what if I couldn’t stand straight? I loved my mother, with her half-rounded ears and pinched, bitter smile, filled with small, elven teeth. I loved her the way any daughter does, unconditionally, even when her eyes were glazed with drink and her hands trembled from fisstech. Even as she called me a freak and refused to look at me. I was young, but even I could see the burning shame that filled her when she saw her own daughter.”

“And my father…” No more sound escapes her lips, each word silently mouthed, shaped and released, against the witcher’s skin, as though it will allow them to dissolve faster, to leave less of an imprint. “He was a cruel bastard, but I loved him too. How could I not? Much as he tried to deny it, I was his daughter. Perhaps that’s why I am like this now,” she huffed, a choked laugh reduced to little more than a puff of air, “perhaps I inherited more of him than either of us would care to admit.”

“It used to be that when people sneered behind my back, when mothers pulled their children closer as I walked past them on the road, I had to stop myself from yelling at them. _Look at what I am_, I wanted to say, _look at the monster you have turned me into_.”

“I never did, of course. Can you imagine the scandal? No, you know as well as I do that the gulf that separates what we do from what we wish to is wider than any ocean. And don’t you know,” A forced, strangled noise escaped her as she chuckled, “don’t you know, after awhile I stopped caring. I accepted that this was the way things were, the way they would always be. I embraced it, even, this absolute conviction that this was my lot, that this is how things were meant to happen.”

“There’s a certain comfort in knowing what you are, even if it’s not what you wish to be.”

The hand resting on his chest feels cold against the burning heat of his body. She can feel his heartbeat echoing inside his chest, pressing against the pads of her fingers even through the thick bandages that encircle him. The bleeding has slowed down, she notes, the bandages rust-red with dried blood, and she finds that breathing becomes easier, if only slightly.

She guides a white strand of hair behind his ear, skin scraping against the stubble beginning to grow around his chin. She allows her fingers to linger longer than necessary, before pulling them, almost shyly, towards her chest.

The breath that escapes her is deep, long, infused with something she doesn’t understand. Despite its heaviness, she doesn’t feel any lighter once it’s gone.

“And then you made your last wish.” Her voice is rising, becoming almost frantic, her fingers curling against his skin, “You could have wished for anything, a whole world of possibilities hanging in front of you, and you made your wish. And I didn’t understand, I couldn’t, why would you –“ Her voice stumbles, stops, dies out and drifts away like smoke. Slowly, her breathing evens out, the wild, panicked look that had settled in her eyes fading away. When she speaks once more, each word is barely more than a breath released into the air.

“I still don’t understand.”

“For some unknowable reason, you condemned yourself to me, despite knowing all too well who I was, who I had been. I could see it on your face the moment you realized, the moment you pieced together the pathetic creature I used to be. It made me angry, so angry the world turned red, but not at you. Who knows why, maybe because you tried to hide it from me rather than force me to confront it, maybe because there are some things that we can only blame ourselves for.”

“I was angry and I did terrible things, and you knew, and yet you made your wish. I remember that night, the wind and the rain whipping my face through the shattered roof of the inn, and being frustrated and confused when you kept insisting that I would die.”

“I knew I probably would, of course,” She pressed her nose against his skin, breathing in deeply, her voice trembling ever so slightly, “I just couldn’t understand… it didn’t make any sense to me… why you would care.”

Cautiously, she intertwines her fingers with the hand at his side, feeling the rough callouses on the pads of his fingers pull at her skin. Despite its stillness, she can still feel the strength in it, written out in muscle and sinew. She squeezes his hand, and though he doesn’t squeeze back she can feel the potential for it, hidden just below the surface.

“Do you remember when you first said the words to me, spoke them out loud? At the banquet on Thanedd, where even the walls have ears, and you said it to me without even a second thought, without any fear or shame of who might have heard. You couldn’t see how it was any different from the times you’d written it out in your thoughts, but I could. You spoke those words, out loud, in front of witnesses, turning them into something concrete, irrevocable.” A small smile spreads across her lips at the thought, violet eyes distant.

“You said those words, and I didn’t know what to do, how to say them back. I did my best, spoke them hurriedly, hidden between a whirlwind of other words and actions. I said them almost flippantly, as though in passing, because anything more meaningful would have lodged itself in the back of my throat. And you asked if you could kiss me, and I said no.”

Sighing deeply, she closed her eyes, pressing her lips against the pressure point at his neck, feeling the blood coursing beneath his skin. Her brow furrowed for a moment as she forced herself to take in a single breath, before smoothing out again.

“I said no. I thought about that many times, afterwards. After… after it all went so terribly wrong. I wondered what I might have said instead, how that could have changed what followed, the assumptions and accusations that were made. Maybe you would have come sooner, maybe I could have spared us some of that pain…”

Raising herself up on her elbows, she presses her lips to his brow, allows her hair to fall over the both of them like a curtain, blocking out the rest of the world. Realistically, she knew he would be fine. The wound was superficial, though it had bled a lot as he stumbled up the steps to her. His body had taken far worse, the evidence of it written out on his skin, but there was something about seeing him like this, so still with blood across his chest.

It was entirely too reminiscent of another time, another place. Dangerously so.

Her voice was a whisper, breath fluttering against the burning, clammy surface of his skin, barely a hairsbreadth away from her mouth.

“Well, I suppose there’s no point in dwelling on the past anymore.”

“I said once that there are gifts which cannot be accepted, if one is unable to reciprocate them with something equally precious. We have tried our best, you and I, and who knows, maybe it is enough.” A moment of silence, and then, more softly, “Maybe it isn’t. But we still have our truth, a shard of ice clutched in the hand, and by the gods,” She paused, took in a deep, shuddering breath, “I will not let it melt.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, so I know it's been awhile. I'm trying to get back into writing, so I thought this would be good practice. I've been re-reading the short stories again, hence the early-Witcher references. My plan is to update WWAB soon, but I hope you at least enjoyed this as I try to get more familiar with the characters.  
I'm worried Yen might be slightly out-of-character here for the sake of introspection, so let me know what you think!


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